“One of us (Wilczek) recalls that as a graduate student he considered the now standard SU(2) x U(l) model of electroweak interactions to be ‘obviously wrong’ just because it requires such ugly hypercharge assignments. … it still seems fair to call the model ‘obviously incomplete’ for this reason.”

“Stephen Weinberg and Abdus Salam tried to combine quantum electrodynamics with what’s called the ‘weak interactions’ (interactions with W’s) into one quantum theory, and they did it. But if you just look at the results they get you can see the glue, so to speak. It’s very clear that the photon and the three W’s are interconnected somehow, but … you can still see the ‘seams’ in the theories; they have not yet been smoothed out so that the connection becomes … more correct.”

Woit has hade the classic “the hypothesis fallacy” interpretational error. Observational test: if the sun’s position changes across the sky in a daily cycle, that proves the sun is orbiting the earth, and the “null hypothesis” is that if it doesn’t change position, then the sun doesn’t orbit the earth. Clearly this is a “false interpretational” set up: you can do all the statistical tests to how ever many sigma (tens or hundreds) that you want, but you’re always excluding the alternative null hypothesis that the earth rotates daily. So your “deciding experiment” or Popperian test is a hoax at the interpretational level. This is also the “epicycle problem”: every experimental or observational finding is interpreted solely within one fashionable mainstream model, with alternatives ignored using fascist bullying. (Another classic example is that climate change proves AGW. Simple! Everyone understands that rising CO2 correlate to rising temperature, you can statistically test the “correlation”. Case proved! Science settled! Also, drink whisky and water and you get drunk, drink gin and water and you get drunk, so water is the “common factor” which must make you drunk, and you can throw a lot of impressive looking graphs of correlation statistics into your paper to try to intimidate all doubters and call them the quacks. But as Delingpole says, it’s simply not science! It ignores other possibilities.)

That’s exactly the same two-hypothesis fallacy that “proved” the changing position of the sun across the sky is due to the daily orbit of the sun around the earth:

(1) If the sun’s position in sky changes, it is orbiting the earth.
(2) If the sun’s position in sky doesn’t change, it is not orbiting the earth.

Collect as much “hard data” as you want and if you analyse it using fake two-hypothesis Popperian criteria, you can “prove” that the sun orbits the earth daily, to however many sigma you want. Pure pseudoscience! Pure dictatorship by thugs!

Science is not about fiddling your hypothesis testing to only two possibilities produce fake Popperian sigma “estimates”. Science must take account of all possibilities, not merely your contrived mainstream delusions, that the spin-0 boson must be the Higgs boson!

Sorry to tell you this, but this is a fallacy: the “Higgs boson” is not any old electroweak symmetry breaking spin-0 boson. It’s defined as a particular part of the Standard Model. If you detect an an electroweak symmetry breaking spin-1 boson, there can be no evidence whatsoever that it is the “Higgs boson”. The “Higgs mechanism” is deeply flawed, it is a vague theory which doesn’t predict the mass quantitatively, and a non-quantitative theory is not science. In addition, it’s method of giving mass to weak bosons is intrinsically anti-quantum gravity. We proved in 1996 that the U(1) Abelian hypercharge gauge of the standard model is actually gravity, correctly predicting the cosmological acceleration of the universe two years before it was discovered: http://rxiv.org/pdf/1111.0111v1.pdf

The electroweak theory of the standard model contains errors, and a spin-0 boson comes from an internal SU(2) electroweak symmetry breaking, not an U(1) X SU(2) Higgs mechanism symmetry breaking.

If you collide particles and see two gamma rays going in opposite directions with similar energy, that “could” be a Higgs or it could just be a random fluke. There is no solid signal that is definitely going to a Higgs, it’s thus a statistics game. You look for two gamma rays or four leptons coming off. When you find this, is it a Higgs, or just a random pattern due to your own prejudice, like seeing the face of Jesus in a tomato?

Because the number of “interesting” or “candidate” events is small, but it’s guaranteed that some noise will occur several sigma or standard deviations beyond what is “expected”. There is an expected fluctuation around what is expected. It may just be random luck. All these interactions are described statistically in terms of cross-sections, which are directly proportional to probability, not absolute certainty. With such a vague “signature”, a lot of events in the random noise will look identical to a “Higgs” signal. But even if a spin-0 Nambu-Goldstone boson can be unambiguously determined with a high probability (not certainty) of not being data “noise”, it will not be the mainstream electroweak theory “Higgs boson” because we have disproved it: the U(1) group is gravitation which means mass is given to SU(2) weak bosons by mixing of gravitational charge, and not by a “Higgs mechanism”!

The LHC experimenters are closing in on the standard Higgs particle. We already know enough to say that the results on Tuesday will either reveal its existence or almost exclude it. “Almost” because there will probably not be sufficient data to rule out a Higgs particle with a mass not much larger than 120 times the proton mass. But even that hiding place will be eliminated in 2012 and, by the end of next year, we should have either discovered the standard Higgs particle or decisively excluded it.

I have been waiting more than 20 years for this. Personally, I am most excited by the possibility that there is no Higgs particle and that nature has chosen a different path. If that is the case, then we are going to have to be patient for a little longer. It will be worth the wait.

Jeff Forshaw is a professor of theoretical physics, University of Manchester, and co-author with Brian Cox of The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen (Allen Lane)

SU(2) electroweak theory was first tried in the 1956 Schwinger-Glashow Yang-Mills theory, but they got it completely wrong: they lacked partial (Glashow-Weinberg) mixing of SU(2) with U(1) gravity to produce the mass of the SU(2) bosons. They were confused.

Instead, what Schwinger and Glashow did in their SU(2) electroweak theory was to manually assign the two charged bosons to weak interactions and the neutral boson to electromagnetism. It was a failure, and was prior to not just neutral currents (massive neutral SU(2) bosons), but was also prior to the discovery that the weak force is left-handed. Weak parity violation was discovered in 1957. The resulting theory of SU(2) electroweak interactions was not only wrong, but also a complete mess, like epicycles.

The correct SU(2) electroweak theory mixing only gives mass to half the SU(2) bosons at low energy because the mass arises not from a “Higgs mechanism” but instead from a partial mixing of U(1) gravity with SU(2). Because the mixing is only partial, some SU(2) bosons become massive (acquire gravitational charge from U(1)), but the rest don’t and they are electromagnetic charge. This explains the handedness of the magnetic field vector in electric currents in terms of spin; weak and electromagnetic interactions are properly unified by SU(2).

As proved with solid experimental prediction-confirmed evidence in our paper, there is no “Higgs boson” because the Standard Model’s U(1) X SU(2) electroweak theory with explicit symmetry breaking (and thus a massive Nambu-Goldstone boson, the “Higgs boson”) is false: the correct electroweak theory is SU(2) with massless SU(2) bosons, and the U(1) “hypercharge” is actually quantum gravity. The mixing of U(1) with SU(2) gives mass to some (not all) of the SU(2) bosons, giving massive left-handed weak bosons. There is no explicit symmetry breaking of the gravity-electroweak U(1) X SU(2), because there is no U(1) X SU(2) symmetry (equality of couplings above the electroweak scale) of the linked gravity and electroweak interactions, just mixing. Gravitation and electroweak interactions are not a “broken electroweak symmetry”; instead they are just mixed (hence the link), and the mixing is controlled by the running mixing parameter (Glashow-Weinberg mixing angle). The successful prediction of the size of the cosmological acceleration in 1996, two years before confirmation, and much further evidence since then substantiates this still further, e.g. particle mass relationships to the Z boson mass, which gives short-ranged neutral currents in the vacuum, conveying gravitational charge (mass) to all the particles.

Horizon on BBC2 did the same trick using Sir Paul Nurse earlier this year in a different documentary which tried to lynch James Delingpole for asking questions in a different science. The trick is used by politicians over here. You first give a long subjective argument full of one-sided biased hype, then just when everyone is brainwashed, bored and changed channels, you inject a brief disclaimer to look objective.

It’s the two-way bet used extensively by politicians, lawyers and the media here. Whatever happens, you claim credit. If you’re right, you’re right. If your hype is wrong, you highlight the brief disclaimer as “proof of rigorous objectivity”.

Copy of comments submitted to James Delingpole’s blog on groupthink hubris:

Tomorrow we are set for the second biggest piece of scientific crackpotism after the groupthink that we live in a greenhouse with a glass ceiling that stops evaporated water from forming cloud cover that cancels out CO2. This is the world’s largest particle accelerator, our £6 billion 27 kilometres circumference underground CERN Large Hadron Collider. Tomorrow, Tuesday 13 December 2011, they announce their first official results for the search for the “Higgs boson”, the modern equivalent of searching for “phlogiston”.

The theory is that electromagnetism and weak force symmetries are explicitly broken by a massive “Higgs boson”, which also provides mass to every other massive particle by acting like an aether. The problem is, the theory doesn’t predict a mass and they are just a pair of equal and oppositely-travelling gamma rays (or maybe weak bosons) with a total energy of 126 GeV. This – if the data are statistically significant – is only going to “confirm” the standard theory because it’s the only theory that is now dogma, just as AGW is dogma. It’s a great achievement to spend £6 billion of European Union taxpayers money on this toy, but how do you know the pair of gamma rays are not coming from another interaction? How do we know that the emails in CERN are not a duplicate those in Climategate 1.0 or 2.0?

You see, I predicted the cosmological acceleration of the universe correctly in 1996 using quantum gravity (the prediction was verified by Perlmutter in 1998, who got the Nobel Prize in physics for setting up some software to automate supernova redshift observations electronically from CCD telescopes). Nature, Classical and Quantum Gravity, later Physical Review Letters, all rejected it as a “non-standard” theory. So do I call them “DENIALISTS”, for ignoring the evidence.

“Denialism” can be directed both ways in science. It’s just a vacuous piece of playground name-calling. What matters is the substance of the science, not how fashionable something is. Fashionability matters for getting funding, of course, and this is where Lord Acton’s “All power corrupts…” comes in. Scientists are no more ethical than anyone else.

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: the Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” in D. A. Goslin, Ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand-McNally, Co., Chicago, 1969, pp. 347-380) has found that peoples go through six stages of ethical development:

(1) Conformity to rules and obediance to authority, to avoid punishment.

(2) Conformity to gain rewards.

(3) Conformity to avoid rejection.

(4) Conformity to avoid censure. (Chimps and baboons.)

(5) Arbitrariness in enforcing rules, for the common good.

(6) Conscious revision and replacement of unhelpful rules.

The same steps could be expected to apply to scientific ethical development. However, the disguised form of politics which exists in science, where decisions are taken behind closed doors and with no public discussion of evidence, stops at stage (4), the level of ethics that chimpanzees and baboons have been observed to achieve socially in the wild.

Note that the CERN quango (like the EU itself) has 20 European members and Britain contributed the 3rd most to the LHC. CERN fiddles its accounts figures on its website: just giving annual running costs, not the gross outlay. Other figures CERN gives are for the LHC machine minus construction and infrastructure costs. If they lie about the costs, will they also lie in their “data”? Who can replicate their data if they fiddle it?

Note also that twenty years ago, American planned to search for the “Higgs boson” by building the “Superconducting Supercollider”, but Congress cancelled it to save money. The whole story of the “Higgs boson”, the “Standard Model” and the superstring theory (which predicts 10^500 different Higgs bosons, one in each parallel universe) is hubris. It’s dictatorship. They only maintain their dogma by Gestapo censorship of alternatives. If they were honestly testing a theory, fine, but it’s a contrived “heads you lose, tails we win” test, where whatever the results are, they will be interpreted within mainstream dogma, which is infallable by virtue of “peer”-review. It’s Climategate, with more obfuscation.

CERN did host a pre-print paper of mine in 2004, see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/706468 but I cannot update that now because they now only accept papers from the string theory “peer”-review censored arxiv.org. CERN has been a complete loss to science since the weak bosons were discovered in 1983.

Observe that 2M is 250 GeV, the electroweak scale. Fourier twisting the (W+,W-,Z) triplet gives a (Z,Z,Z) color triplet, and dualising this triplet we get the right handed (e+,e-,ν). The left handed triplet comes from (W+,W-,γ), which we can send to the (e+,e-,γ) of creation and annihilation with a mixture of Fourier duals. Three massive (weak interaction) bosons and three (electromagnetic) particles, two sides of a coin.”

Then the electroweak (W+,W-,γ) gauge boson triplet would have a massless (e+,e-,γ) gauge boson triplet if massless versions of electric charges exist and if these massless electric charges behave as bosons rather than as fermions (which is of course what happens when two fermions form a bosonic condensate with their half integer spins adding up to an integer); then SU(2) describes electromagnetism as well as weak interactions, provided that a mechanism adds mass in the right way to produce the left handed weak force from part of the electromagnetic interaction. The expected electroweak scale is roughly the sum of the masses of the three weak bosons, (W+,W-,Z) = 81 + 81 + 91 = 253 GeV. Halve that, and you get about 126 GeV, the number the LHC data shows an excess at. This may be a consequence of the fact that only left handed particles – i.e. half of all particles if they exist equally in both helicity states – undergo weak interactions and thus are “visible” to the instruments. The other half of the mass doesn’t undergo weak interactions, so is “invisible” or dark matter, if this is correct. We could be talking about an internal SU(2) symmetry-breaking Nambu-Goldstone boson that is not the mass-giving Higgs boson (mass is instead given by mixing with quantum gravity gauge), but which has a mass equal to M = (1/2)(mW+ + mW- + mZ) ~ 126 GeV.